A Melbourne man who filmed a bus passenger’s racist rant and turned him into a national villain has met the man he shamed four years later.

Mike Nayna’s video of the racist attack on a young French woman in 2012 was the first of its kind to go viral and racked up 4.7 million views.

The seven-minute YouTube clips shows Hayden Stewart, a young dad with a baby in a pram, screaming at Frenchwoman Fanny Desaintjores: “F---ing stop there ay, you bitch. C---. I’ll f---ing box cut you right now, dog”.

A man beside him, David Graham, had threatened to cut off her breasts with a filleting knife, after she and a group of friends started singing songs in French.

Nayna was instantly hailed a hero for filming the video, and trying to stick up for Ms Desaintjores, while Stewart and Graham were condemned as monsters and eventually did jail time over the ugly threats they made.

But when Nayna randomly bumped into Stewart in a Melbourne street he wasn’t feeling like a hero.

In a bizarre coincidence, Nayna had just finished filming a documentary about the viral video – Digilante, to be aired on ABC 2 next Wednesday - and had spent months ruminating on the guilt he felt about his part in publicly crucifying Stewart.

“I saw him and I thought it can’t be him. I must have been editing too much and my mind’s playing tricks,” he told Nine.com.au.

After following him for 30 minutes, Nayna finally built up the courage to confront him, fully expecting to get punched in the face.

But Stewart wasn’t the type of guy Nayna was expecting him to be.

“I was expecting him to be aggressive really. I was preparing myself for some kind of altercation and it didn’t happen. He was just this sweet guy and he was really apologetic and I was apologetic,” he said.

“I think he felt guilty about what happened on the bus and I felt guilty about how I put him in the media afterwards.

“It was strange because there was a sense that we both did something sh---y but we didn’t know who was to blame.”

Hayden Stewart, left, and Mike Nayna four years on. ()

Nayna found out Stewart was on his way to rehab and had just begun picking up the pieces of his life.

“You kind of build someone up to be this monster and he was like this young guy, this young dad, who is trying to get his life together.

“The fact that he didn’t blame me helped. He wasn’t trying to squirm out of it or say, ‘this is your fault’. It was, ‘I did something really bad’,” Nayna said.

The pair have kept in touch and last week sat down to watch the documentary together.

“I asked him if he’s cool with it and he said, ‘yeah’. But obviously the media hasn’t been friendly to the guy and he’s worried about that,” he said.

The 28-minute documentary - which also features an interview with Ms Desaintjores in which she says she never felt in danger or traumatised by the attack – had become
a form of “therapy”, Nayna said, and a way to “try undo some of the damage” caused by the video.

“Nothing good came of it. It made everything a lot worse and people more angry,” Nayna said.

“It didn’t feel like revenge at the time. It felt like I was doing the right thing. But now I look back on it, it was revenge.”